Yates High, UT collaborate to craft better writers

Students will examine the ingredients behind effective writing

Yates High School teacher Carolyn Jones, back row, left, and students Krystal Stone, De Anna Papillion, Niko Nkululeko, front row, left, Micah Brown and Arthur Christopher Jr. are part of a program with UT students to learn how to write persuasively. less

Yates High School teacher Carolyn Jones, back row, left, and students Krystal Stone, De Anna Papillion, Niko Nkululeko, front row, left, Micah Brown and Arthur Christopher Jr. are part of a program with UT ... more

Photo: Kevin Fujii, Chronicle

Yates High, UT collaborate to craft better writers

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Friends, Romans and countrymen — millions of readers have marveled at the rousing eloquence of Mark Antony's death speech in Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Julius Caesar. They've been brought to tears by Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and moved to action by the Rev. Martin Luther King's "Letter from Birmingham Jail."

But how many have turned the next page to ask: "How did the writers achieve their effect?"

In the coming weeks, roughly two dozen college-bound students at Jack Yates High School will pose that question and more as they work via computer with students in a sophomore-level University of Texas rhetoric class.

Yates students, many more comfortable with narrative writing styles, will learn how to read analytically and write persuasively. UT students will have the chance to exercise their knowledge, solidifying their own skills by explaining them to others.

The Students Partnering for Undergraduate Rhetorical Success program is geared to introducing promising students — especially those attending schools in poorer neighborhoods that rarely send graduates to UT — to the rigors of college writing. Throughout the year students will "deconstruct" assignments, tearing apart paragraphs to determine why a writer wrote as he did. Then they'll write their own persuasive paper.

Reading Gatsby

UT students, each assigned to mentor a Yates teen, will advise as the process moves to completion. Professors will critique and grade the final papers. At the course's end, high schoolers will travel to Austin to meet their partners and to tour the campus they someday may attend.

In coming days, high schoolers will be paired with UT students, but already Yates English teacher Carolyn Jones has assigned critical reading assignments, including F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Works from Shakespeare, Lincoln and King soon will be added.

Students gathered for the class one recent morning agreed that the course, among the high school's Advanced Placement offerings, is challenging.

"I think I'm a pretty good writer," said Micah Brown, 16, who hopes to become an aerospace engineer, "but you can always improve." Other students, including De Anna Papillion, 15, who hopes to enter UT to study business or pre-med, and Arthur Christopher Jr., 16, who wants to study forensic science, admitted to shakier writing skills.

"It's difficult to revise and revise again," Jones said. "These kids may have excellent test scores and good grades, but this is a new animal, a new kind of writing. And it's painful."

Tough course

Jim Warren
, a UT postdoctoral fellow who coordinates the program, noted even accomplished writers can be in for an unpleasant surprise when they hit a mandatory freshman writing course at UT.

"We were getting a lot of students who were underprepared to read and write as we asked them to do," he said.

Nathan Kreuter, a graduate student working with the Yates program, said sometimes the problem is simply a student's lack of savvy. "Sometimes someone who is construed as a bad writer is really a quite capable writer who just hasn't figured out what the teacher wants," he said.

Warren said most high school students have little experience with analytical writing because they're coached to master narrative skills needed to score well on TAKS tests. But narrative sentences — such as those in this story — won't cut the mustard in college rhetoric courses.

The program, now in its second full year, is being offered at a dozen Texas high schools. In Houston, the class also is being taught at Madison and Worthing.

While most of the Yates students in Jones' class likely will graduate in the top 10 percent of their class and be assured admission to UT, some may find themselves unready for the rigorous curriculum. In 2005, students at Yates, which occasionally has been rated "academically unacceptable" by the Texas Education Agency, scored a mean 774 points on the SAT college entrance exam. The state mean score was 992 and at Carnegie Vanguard High, which this year is rated "exemplary," the mean score was 1,198.

Jones, a top graduate of Yates' class of '63, said she believes the school is improving, in part because of programs like the UT-Yates collaboration. Yates currently is rated as "academically acceptable."

"This class can help the students to become empowered, to realize that they can build on failures," she said. "They will learn not to be afraid of challenges, to view failures as stepping stones to ultimate success."